Today I’m sitting in Santa Cruz, having spent an action-packed week in downtown San Francisco at Game Developers’ Conference 2014. GDC is an event I’ve wanted to get along to for many years, and I have followed it closely (albeit vicariously) through twitter and the blogosphere for the past few years. I really wasn’t prepared for what a massive event it was. In every time-slot there were at least 3 sessions that I really wanted to see, and usually a couple more that I would be interested in seeing. Luckily, my excellent friend and boss Danu got me an “All Access” pass, which includes 12 months access to the “GDC Vault”, which has recordings of [pretty much] all the sessions. I’ll summarise a few of the main things I took away from the conference.

High-Quality Mobile Graphics

I went to several talks about high-quality graphics, from Imagination Technologies (ImgTec), ARM, Intel, Unity and Epic. They all had different names for what I’m simply calling High-Quality graphics; some talked about “Console Quality”, some talked about “AAA Quality”, some talked about “PC” quality, but the long and the short of it is that mobile SOC’s now have enough compute, and enough memory bandwidth to do graphics at least as good as the last generation of consoles (Xbox360 and PS3), if not better. I learned that you have to be a lot more cunning than on PC, though, because mobile GPU implementations differ quite wildly, so you have to be prepared to have multiple render paths in your engine, and you have to think carefully about what your lowest-common denominator.

Things to watch: ARM announced some GLES 3 extensions which both they and ImgTec support, which should make deferred shading a great deal easier on mobile: one of them is the ability to sample the backbuffer in a shader, and the other is called “Pixel Local Storage” – which allows you to store extra data along with the colour/depth/stencil data in the backbuffer. Essentially, global data, in the same block of memory as the backbuffer, that persistes from draw-call to draw call. You could thus use the backbuffer as your G-Buffer for deferred shading. In addition to this ImgTec announced that they are releasing a new GPU based on their 6 series design, which has ray-tracing hardware in it. The idea would be to use rays for things like shadows and environment maps. It was quite convincing, but if only they have it, it goes against the whole “lowest common denominator” idea. I really hope other vendors pick this up.

Remember that the GPU is Asynchronous

I attended a talk on how to find, fix and avoid “GPU Sync points”, which are places where you make your application code wait for the GPU to do something, causing an enormous pipeline bubble. I attended a talk on how the Nitrous engine from Oxide Games works with AMD’s Mantle, as well as two talks on DirectX 12. Both Mantle, and DirectX 12 bring the application a giant step closer to the GPU, throwing away things like state-tracking in the driver, and the multi-layer App/Client/Server/Driver architectures that we have today. The biggest key from all of these talks was that you have to remember that the GPU is quite far away from the CPU (not quite so far for intel, but miles away for a discrete GPU), and as such you should treat it as an asynchronous resource. Queue work up, and let it go.

Things to watch: Both Mantle and DirectX 12 allow the application to create resources and queue work on the GPU from whatever thread they want. I had some conversations (with some people who will remain nameless) that lead me to believe OpenGL (at least OpenGL ES) will head in this direction in the near future. If you are building engines, you better be building them to be task based. If you’re using other people’s engines, you better demand that they are building them task-based, and making them scale well with multiple cores. Dan Baker from Oxide Games mentioned in two separate talks that their task-based architecture, when unleashed with Mantle or DX12, took them from being CPU bound in DX11 to [sometimes] being GPU bound. The powers-that-be are about to give us the ability to actually use our GPUs, make sure you’re ready to do so.

We’ve got to fix this monetization thing

For all this tech talk, I felt like there was a bit of a looming shadow at the conference: despite the ease with which you can distribute a good game, it is really hard to get your good game noticed, because the market is awash with games that have been ruined because the designers built the thing around fleecing the customers. Something like 60% of the show floor was advertising and payment processing providers. There was a talk on “how to monetize teens”. I attended the rant session, and there was a slide with a count-down, and an “IAP” that could get us to the next slide; eventually two guys got up and paid some money to the speaker, and he asked the crowd to “give the Whales a round of applause” – all of this, obviously, was to make a point. Later in that session, we were reminded that the terms “Minnow” and “Whale” come from the slot-machine industry, and we were challenged about the morality of viewing our audience in the same way. Then I found out that Firaxis/2K/Take-Two brought X-Com Enemy Unknown to mobile for $25 (NZD) and that it is selling like wild-fire and driving console and PC sales! I reminisced with others about the good old days of Doom, and Wolfenstein, and Commander Keen, and other games which we all got the first few levels for as shareware, and then bought the full version later. By the end of the week, I came to this conclusion: we (the industry) need to stop making slot machines for children, and start making fun games, that people want to play, and want to play again, and then work out how to avoid giving it all away for free. Concentrate on making awesome games, stop working out how to fleece your players.

Things to watch:  There was a massive room full of people present at the rant session, I can only hope a bunch of them took on board the idea of making good games, rather than designing mechanics to fleece their customers.

Conclusion

GDC was awesome. Mobile tech has got awesome. We need to make awesome games.